by J. L. Harden
Wasteland Wonderland
Part 3
By J. L. Harden
The
Redemption
of
Edgar
Ramirez
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 1
I’ve always been a night person.
Like the old comic book superheroes. Batman. Daredevil. Superman. Wait. Did Superman hang out at night? Sure he did. He was basically a god.
Anyway, I’m getting distracted. Need to focus. Because what I wanted to talk about is how at night… the city goes quiet.
The world goes quiet.
This whole part of the fucking solar system goes quiet.
And if you listen closely enough, you can hear it. You can hear the Universe whispering to you.
And sometimes, on rare and special occasions, the Universe doesn’t whisper.
Sometimes it shouts at you.
Yells at you.
Grabs you by the collar and screams in your goddamn face.
And sometimes, on rare and special occasions, like this occasion right now, the Universe takes the form of a Villain, a Bad Guy, the Devil. And this Devil, right? He’s shouting at you. He’s pointing a gun at your chest, at your heart. And then he’s pointing it at your head.
And I’m wondering where this dumb and desperate son of a bitch got a gun from.
I’m wondering if it’s even loaded.
It’s probably not.
Bullets are scarce these days.
So now I’m wondering what this guy hopes to accomplish by pointing an unloaded gun at my face.
William Shakespeare once said, “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women are merely players.”
Shakespeare, the smart fucker, he was right.
And in the middle of the night, in the small hours, below ground, below the Wasteland, deep on the wrong side of the Buried City, when it’s pitch dark… the streetlight becomes your spotlight.
And all of a sudden, you’re center stage with the Universe, with the Bad Guy, the Villain, the Devil. And he’s pointing a gun at your head, at your face.
And he steps into your spotlight. Your spotlight. And he’s yelling at you and he’s shouting at you.
And he wants your money.
Your knife.
Your radio.
Your jacket.
Your boots.
He wants to know how many credits you have to your name.
He wants to know if you have a gun.
“Do you have a gun? Don’t you fucking lie to me.”
He wants anything you have of value. He wants you to hand it over. “Right fucking now.”
Because the Universe does not want you to be tied down with material possessions. The Devil does not want you to be obsessed and concerned with money and credits that you’ve spent a lifetime saving for when you score a ticket on to one of the Shuttles, for when you get the call up to Ark America.
I think about telling him how many credits I have. Just to see the look on his face.
I think about handing my money over.
Cash.
Coins.
Pieces of paper with IOU’s hastily scrawled on them.
Bullets, which can be used to trade for anything and everything.
I think about handing over all of it.
And my radio.
And my knife and my gun. And my back up gun.
And my shoes.
No.
Not my shoes.
Fuck that.
And I tell the Universe it’s not about material possessions. It’s not about money and credits.
It’s the principle of the thing.
I tell the Universe he’s not getting my boots or my radio or my gun. And he’s sure as shit not getting my back up gun.
And the Universe, the Bad Guy, the Devil, he’s done yelling.
And we are center stage. Players. Actors.
Sharing a spotlight.
I snatch the gun out of the Devil’s hands and I’m pretty sure I break his fingers in the process and just as I expected, the gun is too light. It is unburdened with the weight of ammunition, unburdened with the ability and the capacity to take lives. Just as I expected, this gun is not loaded because this poor bastard can’t afford the bullets.
So I take out my gun, a semi-automatic pistol.
And you better believe it’s heavy and loaded.
I aim the gun at the Devil’s heart and I squeeze the trigger. And the night explodes. And the flash of the gunshot is as bright as our spotlight, as bright as the Red Giant.
For a nanosecond.
And then the night goes quiet.
The Universe goes quiet.
I step out of the spotlight.
I step into the dark.
Chapter 2
And now I’m standing in the morgue.
Below the morgue.
Below a hospital full of critically injured and mortally wounded people.
I’m below the Buried City.
Below the Wasteland.
Half way to hell.
I’m in deep.
So fucking deep.
But there’s no turning back now. No chance. It’s time to stand up for what’s right. Time to stand up and fight for your friends, for the people of the Buried City, for the people of the Wasteland.
For the last people left on Earth.
Don’t screw up this time.
Don’t screw up.
Innocent people and not so innocent people need your help. Because at the moment, most of them, if not all of them, are blissfully ignorant to the reality of their current situation. And up until a few days ago, I was just as ignorant. I was just as naïve.
“They’re stable,” Max says to me. “For the moment. But they will need time to recover.”
Max then goes on to explain how he has special formulations that can speed up the healing and recovery process. But both the girls, both Zoe and Angel are in bad shape. Both of them were beaten and tortured. Both of them were exposed to the surface air temperature for an extended period of time without any kind of protective clothing.
Angel is lying flat on her back. She keeps whispering the names of her friends. The girls who escaped from Wonderland. I can’t quite make out what she’s saying. All I know is, these girls need my help. They’re on the run. They’re all alone. They have no one else to turn to. Nowhere else to go.
You’re their goddamn knight in shining armor so don’t fuck this up.
Not like the last time.
The last time.
That last trip.
It was five years ago.
You pushed on, when you should’ve taken shelter, pushed on through the biggest sandstorm the world has ever seen, pushed on when you were ambushed by Wasteland Raiders. You pushed on when you were attacked by the twisted and mutated things from faraway places.
You should’ve taken shelter. Should’ve turned back.
But you’re a stubborn son of a bitch and you wanted the pay day. You wanted to get in the good books of the good Lord.
You weren’t thinking about people’s lives. You weren’t thinking about the risks. Not like you should’ve. All you were thinking about was strolling through the Gates of Wonderla
nd. Boarding a Shuttle. All you were thinking about was living amongst the stars on a great continental Ark.
I’ve got blood on my hands. And I carry the burden, the weight on my shoulders, the weight of the lives I’ve lost.
So it’s time to make things right. Time to at least attempt to make up for the mistakes I’ve made.
“It’s a maker’s mark,” Max says.
Maximillian Schroder, a man who I always thought was batshit insane, shows me a bullet. Shows me the base of the bullet.
Omega Camp.
The Greek letter for Omega.
“You see?” he asks.
“Yeah. I see it.”
He throws it into a large plastic container, a plastic bathtub of what appears to be acid. “They can track the bullets that they manufacture and alter. Guns as well.”
I take a step back from the container of acid. “Isn’t that dangerous? Won’t that cause the gunpowder to ignite?”
“No. This is another special formulation. Another secret.”
I take him at his word but I continue to keep my distance. And then I curse myself for not realizing, for not even considering the possibility that Wonderland could track and monitor the weapons they create.
Max hands me a gun. It is not from Wonderland. It is from a very faraway place. It was made and manufactured on another continent, thousands and thousands of miles away, half a world away. A place where the brass of Wonderland have no control over. A place long gone and long abandoned by humans. A place buried by sand and desert and destroyed by the Red Giant.
Max says this gun was made by another camp. Another camp just like Omega Camp. Just like Wonderland.
He then hands me a few different kinds of grenades. Smoke grenades. Flash grenades. Frag grenades.
And I can’t believe I never considered the possibility that Wonderland, the Lord, the Collector, all those goddamn Enforcers, never considered the possibility that they could track and monitor their weapons and their ammunition. I was just happy to take them. Happy to use them.
Max makes me get rid of my guns that I have on me. He disassembles them and destroys the small tracking device hidden within the gun’s components, within its mechanisms, within its parts.
He then continues to destroy the bullets, all of them, melting them all down in a plastic bathtub of highly concentrated acid, or whatever it is. Max is wiser and smarter and more resourceful than I ever gave him credit for. I always knew he was a brilliant surgeon and pathologist, a kind of strange wizard who could talk to dead people and discern the nature of their deaths and figure out if they died the wrong way or the right way. But he is also an excellent leader. An excellent commander and strategist. His mind works at a furious pace, giving him the ability to think far into the future, giving him the ability to entertain and hypothesize over a damn near incalculable number of possible scenarios, giving him the ability to always be two steps ahead of his adversaries and enemies.
Five steps ahead.
Ten…
Even still, he’s the last person I expected to be hiding away a treasure chest of weapons. A war chest full of untraceable guns and bullets and weapons of mass destruction.
Once he’s done disassembling and destroying my guns, he moves over to Zoe and checks her vital signs.
Zoe keeps passing in and out of consciousness. She’s struggling to stay awake, resisting the need for rest. She is a fighter. No doubt about it. But right now, all she needs to do is recover. She’s no help to anyone in her current state.
Angel is somehow still awake, still whispering the names of her friends, her fellow escapees.
She then seems to regain lucidity. And as soon as she does, she starts begging to come with me. To join the fight. To save her friends.
I ignore her requests. I ask her where she thinks the girls would be hiding.
She tells me that she doesn’t know where the girls are right now. “The only person that does… is Sally Miller.”
Sally, is the head of the Water Treatment Plant. She was the one that helped the girls hide and stay hidden. Once they made it through the Long Tunnel, Sally helped them get away. And it turns out, Sally had to keep moving the girls around, from hide site to hide site. Because once they found a nice and secluded place to lay low, it was never very long before the Wonderland Enforcers showed up.
So right now, Sally is the only one who knows where the girls are.
“They could be anywhere,” Angel says. “Anywhere in the Buried City.”
I shake my head. “Sally is smart. She won’t just hide them anywhere. Wherever the hide site is, it’ll be good.”
Angel seems to be relieved with this bit of information. She then picks up a loose bullet, looks at the base of it. Makes sure it’s good and clean and untraceable. “I want to go with you,” she repeats. “I want to help. You need my help.”
She keeps pestering me, telling me she’s a crack shot with a rifle. She tells me she helped my brother take on a small army of Enforcers and Mercs. She tells me she helped take down a goddamn Overseer.
I tell her I work better alone.
“But my friends,” she says. “I need to help them… I need to know they’re okay.”
I tell her to save her strength. I tell her she just cheated a very painful death. And that she’ll get another chance to use her skills.
She’ll get another chance real soon.
“I’ll get your friends,” I say. “I’ll bring them back here. You have my word.”
Angel lowers her head. She again looks at the untraceable bullet in her hands. Her hands are shaking from exhaustion. She drops the bullet. Any semblance of lucidity is quickly vanishing.
Damn. I still need the names of the other girls.
I kneel down next to her. “Angel, I need the names of your friends.”
But she doesn’t answer. Can’t answer. Can’t speak. She’s beginning to fall into a deep, deep sleep.
“Max, what the hell did you give her?” I ask.
“Something for the pain,” he says. “And something to help her rest.”
“Angel,” I say louder, grabbing her by the shoulders. “What are their names?”
A second ago she was all fire, ready for revenge, ready to kill a whole lot of people with a high powered sniper rifle.
And now she can’t even keep her eyes open.
“Angel? I need their names.”
Her eyes flicker open. “London,” she whispers. “Brooklyn. Paris.”
Whatever Max has pumped her full of has taken the edge off her pain and has made her unbelievably drowsy. But she manages to whisper their names.
And then she tells me what they’re running from.
“We’re running from Wonderland.”
From the Collector and the Lord.
From the Enforcers
From the Overseers.
She says, “We were slaves.”
We were prisoners.
We were kept in luxury, hidden away from everyone. We never wanted for anything… except freedom.
She whispers the names of her friends.
Ruby.
London.
Brooklyn.
Paris.
These girls, they are strong. But they are desperate. They are ready to sacrifice their lives, ready to sacrifice everything for freedom, for a shot at a better life.
She says, “My friends… are like me. They have all been taught how to shoot and how to use a knife and how to fight. They were taught these deadly skills by the bored Wonderland Enforcers. By arrogant men who saw no threat with turning the slaves they kept, women they abused, into competent soldiers and hunters and killers. Ruby led the way. She got her hands on a key and on the access code. She made us believe. She sacrificed herself for us. When she realized we were being hunted by an Overseer, she left our hiding place. Wandered out alone into the Buried City. Went searching for Hector. Sally had told us about him. Said if anyone could protect us from an Overseer, it was him. So Ruby went off into the
world, searching for your brother. I like to think that she was happy. That maybe for a second or two… she felt like a free woman. That for a second or two, she felt free… walking the streets of the Buried City. Maybe strolling through the markets. I don’t know. She’s dead now and I’ll never know. But we owe her everything. It’s only a matter of time now. They’ll come for us. For everyone. And they’ll kill everyone just to make sure…”
“Make sure of what?”
“That there’s peace,” she whispers, her head drooping, her eyes closing. “The lie. People need to believe the lie. There’s no peace otherwise. And if there’s no peace, if people aren’t placid, if people aren’t calmly waiting for their number to be called, if they aren’t peacefully waiting for access into Wonderland, they won’t be so easy to massacre.”
Angel passes out and the word ‘massacre’ hangs in the air.
Something is rotten in Wonderland.
Hector stumbled onto a whole lot of trouble.
I instinctively check the GPS tracking device strapped to my left wrist. It shows me Hector’s location and his vital signs.
He’s alive.
His heart rate is strong and steady.
His location… beyond the walls of Wonderland.
There’s still time…
I’m about to leave but Max grabs me by the arm. He gives me another gun. A revolver. He gives me four spare magazines for the semi-automatic pistol he gave me earlier.
He assures me they’re all clean. All untraceable.
Max then eyes the tracking device on my wrist. He says, “Edgar, you must be careful. Hector is in the hands of Wonderland now. He may be used against you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Always lure your enemy out of hiding with something to gain. Your love for Hector, for your brother, it is a dangerous thing. It makes you vulnerable.”
I tell him I’ll be careful.
But Max is still worried. He is visibly stressed. There is something on his mind. Something he’s not telling me.
“What is it, Max? What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong? Apart from everything…
Max says, “I have lived through more of these events than I care to admit, than I want to admit.”
